Stone Age LotFP

By: Unknown on 07:14

by DeviantArtist Stephen Daymond

I had an idea this morning for a short RPG campaign where the PCs are survivors of a stone age tribe broken up by some sort of disaster, like a bigass storm wrecking their camp and scattering the clan.  There's been a handful of caveman style RPGs over the years, and at least one GURPS supplement (GURPS Ice Age, IIRC) but I'm thinking Lamentations of the Flame Princess would get the job done in a suitably creeped up fashion with just a smidgeon of work.  One place that would need a little bit of thought is the Common Activities rules, a.k.a. the skill list.

Architecture - This is basically Find Traps/Find Sliding Walls/etc of the older versions.  While architecture as such probably hasn't been invented yet, similarly interesting environment factors can come into play, like figuring out if a cliff is too crumbly to climb safely.  Maybe call it Enviromental or something like that.

Bushcraft - I kinda want to split this into Hunting and Gathering, since I imagine those two activities taking a lot of time and being split up among different specialists in the tribe.

Climb - No change needed.

Languages - If you assume that language is a fairly new invention and that everyone speaks a slightly different dialect of the same ur-tongue then the LotFP "roll to understand the new guy" rules actually make more sense.  No change needed.

Open Doors - Since doors probably haven't been invented reskin as Feat of Strength or something like that.

Search - No change needed.

Sleight of Hand - No change needed, but with no pockets to pick this might not be the most useful skill to develop, though I'm sure some enterprising player can get some use out of it.

Sneak Attack - No change needed.

Stealth - No change needed.

Tinker - Locks don't exist yet and mechanically fiddly traps are probably rare as hen's teeth, but I like the idea of a skill that rates technological prowess.  Flintknapping, bowmaking, even basket-weaving could fall under this category.

A few other things in LotFp would need to be changed as well.  The MU would need to be modded to lose the books and lab.  How demihumans would fit into the scheme would need to be addressed.  How one earns XP in a world without an excess of hidden riches is another issue.